mystery of the movie actor

I never know what to say about movies.
My experience of movies has been that the language used about movies doesn’t make sense of that experience.

When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did and what theater was. These ideas were passed onto film, as if film were merely the extension of theater. It did not occur to Edison, or to others in the first period of moviemaking, to do more than let the camera record a basically theatrical experience. It was as if one were just taking a big extended photograph of a play.

Now, the play is certainly not a spontaneous experience, but it soon became evident that the theater and the movie operate in different dimensions. The actor in a play may rehearse the part, certainly has to memorize the lines, appears in a stage setting, interacts with others who have also memorized lines, etc. – but all within the defining experience of the performance. The actor’s experience of the play and the audiences is equivalent.

This radically changed with film. It was blown to hell. The idea that the film would mimic the play – photograph it - could not long ignore the technical nature of film making, which allows one to create a performance out of an ensemble of many cuts. And that is key – at that moment, the experience of the audience is fatally and finally cut adrift from the experience of the actor. It is, of course, still possible to film a play, but movies generally are built on the ruin of the old regime, in which the actor experiences the unity of his part in something that occurs from beginning to end at one time. This rarely if ever happens in movies.

Of course, this became, very early, a trope in film. Since the silent films, movies have loved to show – to gleefully demystify – their making. They love to focus the camera on the camera focusing on the actor, they love to show the fakery of it all, they love to show the director, sitting in a director’s chair, saying cut. The cliché quickly and thoroughly penetrated the culture.

However, even as the difference made by the movie was exposed again and again, we retained old, theatrical ways of looking at what was happening. We still called the figures mouthing the lines and pretending to be detectives or kings ‘actors’. And though auteur theory wasn’t really codified until the fifties, the characteristics of it in movie appreciation appeared early on – as though the director was an author.

And so, newpaper and magazine movie critics will write about the performance of the ‘actor’ in the film as something that occurs like the performance of an actor in a play – they will ignore what they know, and what every movie abundantly references – that this is very much a synthesis, rather than a spontaneous unity. The movie references this in its camera work, its transitions, its ‘special effects’, etc., and we know after we have finished it that our experience of it as a performance was an illusion. Even the dimmest movie goer sees through the illusion. The ironic entailment of the reality affect offered by movies is that they become less ‘real’ – they reveal themselves as process the realer they are.

So what are these figures? Are they actors?

There’s a story told on the DVD of Ni Toit ni Loi (Vagabond). In one of the last scenes in the film, Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress who plays Mona – the film’s central figure – wanders into a small French village where the grapes have just been harvested. The village celebrates by allowing a sort of carnival – men dressed up like wine demons capture whoever wanders by – civilians – and dunks them in a vat of wine, or throws grapes at them. According to the interview, when Bonnaire played in this scene, she was not expecting these grape demons – and she was really terrified by them as they chased her around, and eventually into a phone booth. It is an excellent scene – but it would never work in theater. In the unity of the experience of audience and actors that makes up theatrical performance, and actor who doesn’t know what is happening destroys the code of the performance. He or she isn’t better or worse at that point, but becomes a non-actor. However, this rule simply doesn’t apply in film. This is why film actors often speak of acting a role in terms of the way they physically throw themselves into it – rather than, as theater actors do, the way they throw themselves into it psychologically. Bonnaire lets her hair go, doesn’t wash it, or herself – DeNiro pumps himself up to 250 pounds for Raging Bull – etc. Now, it isn’t the case that the film actor doesn’t try to assume psychological characteristics, or the theater actor is not concerned with the body as an instrument – it is a matter of what is subordinate to what. In a sense, the actor in movies, cut off from the entirety of the film by the process of making the film, is doing something very different than what we call acting. A movie is a riposte to methodological individualism – the fundamental level at which the movie works is not reduceable to the separate and individual contributions of the people involved in it. We understand it that way for giving prizes, and because the myth of the individual is something that, at least in America, we pay lip service to. In making movies, the West invented an art form that it did not have the conceptual structure to understand.

Which is why I am uncomfortable with saying things about movies. Because the words I have to use were killed by the camera.

Crossposted from Limited Inc: Freedom and Money

As every amateur of economics knows (fellow cranks gather round!), money is a mystery that no classical or neo-classical theory has ever solved. Or rather, given the usual fictions of perfect markets with zero transaction costs, there would be no need for money. Thus, the hired, petty visionaries of the capitalist system have devised a model of that system that does not distinguish money from barter – a most embarrassing situation.

Whether Marx did any better is a much disputed question. Keynes, on the other hand, does seem to have grasped the nature of money more fully than others. In the General Theory, he wrote that “the second differentia of money is that it has an elasticity of substitution equal, or nearly equal, to zero; which means that as the exchange value of money rises, there is no tendency to substitute some other factor for it; - except, perhaps, to some trifling extent, where the money-commodity is also used in manufacture or the arts. This follows from the peculiarity of money that is utility is solely derived from its exchange value, to that the two rise and fall pari passu, with the result that as the exchange value of money rises there is no motive or tendency, as in the case of rent-factors, to substitute some other factor for it.”

What this brilliantly points to is that money is the socially materialized form of the principle of substitution itself, and in this way, the money system does compete against the barter system. The latter, of course, is far from a primitive form of the economy – it is, in fact, in millionfold daily use in the U.S.A. Whenever a man says to a woman, I went to see x film with you, now you have to watch x tv show with me; whenever a child says to another child, I gave you half of my M and Ms, now you have to let me play with your game; etc., the barter system is alive and well. It is an adhoc system of socialization, and it is certainly as important as money. The competition between the money system and the barter system also goes on a millionfold daily. At a certain point, one ‘feels’ the threat of the money system to our identifying social acts of barter, which is why such rule of thumb adages about not loaning money to relatives and the like float on our breaths.

But more to my present purpose – the advent of the money system as one in which the substitution principle enters as the unsubstitutable moment was felt to have something alchemical or uncanny about it. This is captured in Faust the second part. And it was also a significant dimension in the discourse about Freedom that became so important in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. On the negative side, there is no substitute – no alternative – to the principle of subsitution. On the positive side, this frees us from the bondage of the various, infinite and intimate forms of the barter system. Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money, makes a crucial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. He uses the example of a schoolboy who, graduating from the gymnasium, steps into the freedom of his college days – a freedom that is “quite empty and almost unbearable” – and so quickly throws himself into other activities, for instance student organizations, that enforce a whole new set of rules of behavior upon him – in contrast to a businessman, who works to receive freedom from a regulation because, once that regulation is dissolved, he can expand his business in a certain way – the “freedom to” is defined by expectations that will concretely materialize upon the moment of ‘liberation”, while the ‘freedom from” is defined by the lack of any clear expectation beyond the point of liberation.

“In brief, every act of liberation shows a specific proportion between the emphasis and extension of the overcome circumstance and that of the one gained.”

Introducing the principle of substitution as the universal rule of the economic sphere does create freedom from, but – as Simmel points out – it also creates a certain alienation. I’ll end this note with this bit from Simmel (who I hate to translate – his language is almost impossibly hooked together in German so as to make translation a drag):

Beginning with the peasant who wins his freedom by the extension of the money system: “Clearly, it was freedom that he gained; but only freedom from something, not freedom to something; evidently, a seeming freedom to all – because it was simply negative – but actually without any directive, with any determined and determining content and thus disposing to that emptiness and lack of restraint, which is produced by every extension without resistance of that accidental, delusive, and seductive impulse – corresponding to the fate of the unfettered person who has given up his gods and thus won “freedom” only to give space for making an idol out of every arbitrary momentary value. It isn’t any different with many businessmen, for whom, burdened with the care and labor of his business, makes it his cherished goal to sell it. When he finally, with the price in his hand, is really ‘free”, there ensues often enough that typical boredom, that sense of the pointlessness of life, that inner disquiet of the rentier, that drives him to the most wonderful, and to inner and outer sense most irrational business ventures, by which he only constructs a substantial content for his freedom. It is just like the bureaucrat, who wants only to reach a stage as quickly as possible where his pension will allow him a “free” life.”

Time and pop music

“All uncultured peoples sing and act, and what they act they sing, and they sing their treatises. Their songs are the archive of the people, the treasury of their science and religion, their theogony and the cosmogony of their fathers, and the events of their history; the impression of their hearts, the image of their domestic life in joy and sorry, in the bridal bed and the grave. Nature has given them a comfort against the many evils that oppress them, and a substitute for many of the so called blessing we enjoy, that is, free love, laziness, tumult and song.” - Herder.

The country folk cutting furze for the Guy Fawkes bonfires the third chapter of Hardy’s Return of the Native – called the “Custom of the Country” – are presented to us, at first, as anonymous creatures in the falling dark, as they would have been seen by ‘a looker-on posted in the immediate vicinity.’ When the bonfires “sprang into the sky”, the faces of the people around them emerge – although, as Hardy is careful to state, this illumination – good for our supposed on-looker – blinds the people around the bonfire to what is happening in the further darkness outside of it. Having lit the pile, what do they do? An old man begins it:

“With his stick in his hand he began to jig a private minuet, a bunch of copper seals shining and swinging like a pendulum from under his waistcoat: he also began to sing, in the voice of a bee up a flue—“

Naturally, they sing. For a contemporary on-looker, the strange thing revealed in the songs and the following conversation is what is left out: there is no indication that, among the young and the old gathered there, any song is particularly tied to an age group.

Hardy loved his dying festivals of the folk – another one, a dance, is put at the beginning of Tess. However, even if one goes a long way into the darkness around the bonfire on the Rainbarrow, until one meets a more urban local – pop culture as we know it, with its explicit, commercial effort to produce demographics as units of exploitation didn’t exist. Popular culture existed, of course, in abundance – the archive of the folk was being written and rearranged, visual and text culture was definitely colonizing the collective sensorium, but at what we would consider a very primitive level.

Our popworld is quantitatively different. And among the curious effects it has wrought, none is so curious as the way in which age group identification has fused with artifacts that are built to obsolesce. Such as songs. Why people in the Western world, between the age of 13 and 30, identify so ardently with songs, and why those songs then become age and generational markers for them, remains, as far as I can tell, an under-researched question.

I’m thinking about it because of a novel I am reviewing. The novel is basically about a middle aged man – my age, in fact, or thereabouts – who is in a horny sweat about young women. Now, this familiar character type is still good for loads of fun – he is a perpetual Punch, except instead of carrying a stick to beat Judy on the head, he carries a dick to beat himself – figuratively – on the head. All one needs, really, for comedy is a man and a stick – Moliere knew this, as did, well, every farceur going back to Aristophanes.

But the novel pitches uneasily between farce and sentimentality. The character has a penchant for remembering past girlfriends. All of his memories are sound tracked. The sound tracks are the songs of certain groups that came out when he was 13-30. And it is his melancholy observation that these songs are unknown to the youth.

This is an old American trope – or at least as old as the Cold War culture. Curiously, having set your heart on a certain set of songs precisely because they are new – and thus, wear their obsolescence on their very faces – Americans, as they grow older, use the fact that those songs don’t have the same effect on others who are in the 13-30 range, or might not even be known by them, to ‘feel old’.

On one side of this transaction, then, we have the pop culture industry producing goods that are marked explicitly within the continuum of the old-new – a time scheme appropriate to a consumer economy built around obsolescence. On the other side, you have consumers who actually identify, in some way, with these songs. They use them as elements in their own personal soundtrack. And even as they accept them as new, they then continue to drag them around as petrified mementoes of the new. In this way, the middle aged consumer can feel simultaneously new/old, while – in the pop world – a culture that is managed almost exclusively by the middle aged manages to produce zip that one could call, middle aged culture. There is nothing new for the middle aged – it is always the once-new.

This is, actually, an amazingly valuable paradox, and it may be reaching an endpoint. Fortune had a recent story about the amazingly shrinking music industry:

“In 2008, just 35% of album sales came from new releases, the lowest percentage since Nielsen began tracking the data in 1991. Instead of breaking new acts, major labels are increasingly relying on legacy artists and their catalogues.
Case in point: EMI with the Beatles. "EMI is run on catalogues," says Steve Knopper, author of Appetite for Self-Destruction, an account of the record industry's demise. "It prevents them from ever being completely destitute."”

Indeed, apparently EMI has become the house of Beatles, as that fifty year old, long dead band has become their core profit center. The long dead John Lennon, who would have been seventy this year, is going to be pimped out by EMI’s zombiemasters in order to squeeze more pence out of … out of who?

Surely the 50-70 demographic. Nostalgia is the emotional surplus value of the pop product; the “greatest hits,” “collectors edition”, “reunion tour” turns it into profit. The youth culture thus petrifies inside the non-young, as if they never can give up the taste of the yolk they once were on their tongue.

This juxtapositon of the obsolete/new is more, I think, than the temporal scheme manufactured by the pop industry. It is the sign under which America itself, the Cold War country that created the world’s first pop industries, has gone dysfunctional. Under the gun of nuclear war, the Cold War generations experienced the new/obsolete schema when it was, itself, fairly new. It was never really part of the deign that the consumers would take up their pop songs like a cross of age and trudge with it to the grave. But they have done so. The rival time scheme of both the “songs of the folk” and high culture were marginalized – the eternal return, or the eternal now – and in their place we live in the popdome 24/7. It once had energy, it once liquidated all the barbarous hierarchies, but it now sits on our neck, trivializing our every season. The empires of pop manufacture – all those horrible record companies, those multi-media ‘entertainment’ enterprises - are going down, and we are going with them.

News of the vampire squid

The little gremlins of history have been blindly tap tapping their way down the newspaper tunnel, unrolling bits and pieces of our secret history – a history crowning the decade of peak imbecility, the 00s. In November last year, Bloomberg ran a big story about the negotiations between the U.S. and AIG’s counterparties in December, 2008, which it was revealed that team U.S., headed by Geithner, blithely ignored all advice and forked over 100 percent of AIG’s alleged obligation to, among others, Goldman Sachs. It so happened that the ex GS CEO, Hank Paulson, was the Secretary of Treasury, and it so happened that in September, 2008, when the Treasury and the New York Fed confabbed to try to figure out how to decently socialize AIG’s trillion dollar bets and pretend it was still capitalism, the one bank that was invited to attend the meeting was… Goldman Sachs.

Now, we have known about the 12.9 billion for some time. The story Goldman Sachs crafted in response is a masterpiece of doubletalk, around what seems to be an outright lie.

“Goldman, for its part, has insisted it did not need the bailout money because it was "always fully collateralized and hedged."

Long Wall Street's largest investment bank before it recently became a bank holding company, Goldman answered a series of questions from Reuters about the bailout funds.
"We can say that our notional exposure to AIG is a fraction of what it was at the time of the September bailout," Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said.
Asked why Goldman Sachs took $12.9 billion of taxpayer money if it was collateralized and hedged on its AIG positions, DuVally said it was because AIG was not allowed to fail, so Goldman did not get money from hedges that would have paid out if the insurer had collapsed. And, he said, under the terms of its contracts with AIG, Goldman was entitled to collateral.
DuVally also said the bank does extensive due diligence on all its counterparties.”

Well, it does take balls – balls made of soap bubble, blood, old bacon grease and curdled milk – to proclaim, with a straight face, that Goldman Sachs does “extensive due diligence’ on all counterparties when answering a question about a counterparty, AIG, whose operations cost the government 180 billion dollars to bail out, just going in. It is like proclaiming that you do extensive due diligence on your friendship while explaining all the pictures of you partying with Jeffrey Dahmer.

Now, however, we know what happened – to a certain extent – between Goldman Sachs and AIG – we know that Goldman Sachs was behind the final tipping over of AIG; the mystery of why Societe General was paid out so much in the AIG bailout is explained; and the GS lie – that it was “fully collateralized”, which has never made any sense, given the nature of the international financial environment in December, 2008 – is exposed for the lie it is just a little bit more:

“In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm.
In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions, a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Société Générale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G., was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck.
Goldman stood to gain from the housing market’s implosion because in late 2006, the firm had begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market soured. The further mortgage securities’ prices fell, the greater were Goldman’s profits.
In its dispute with A.I.G., Goldman invariably argued that the securities in dispute were worth less than A.I.G. estimated — and in many cases, less than the prices at which other dealers valued the securities.
The pricing dispute, and Goldman’s bets that the housing market would decline, has left some questioning whether Goldman had other reasons for lowballing the value of the securities that A.I.G. had insured, said Bill Brown, a law professor at Duke University who is a former employee of both Goldman and A.I.G.
The dispute between the two companies, he said, “was the tip of the iceberg of this whole crisis.”

To sum up – amazingly, the Treasury invited Goldman Sachs to its preliminary meetings with A.I.G. in September, and Goldman Sachs used its privileged knowledge to pump even more money out of A.I.G., which then has to be propped up for the not insiginificant sum of 180 billion in December, of which some large part goes directly to Goldman Sachs, and some part goes to Goldman circuitously, through Societe Generale.

We know the Bush/Obama people who did this. And these are the people who have designed our entire response to the depression.

They are backed up, of course, by the collective intellectual firepower of those people who designed the occupation of Iraq, who populate the Pentagon. It is no longer a question of whether the elite is stupid, mad, vicious, corrupt, and gorged with the theft of natural resources that are even now being taken out of the mouths of infants worldwide and stuffed up the asshole of GS shareholder – it is a question of the disconnect, the democratic shortfall, that allows this clique to operate with impunity.
Another zona story.

and the architects of our disaster are reappointed in time to do it again!

The headlines over the last few days have come out of history’s back pocket – or Nemesis’s. What could be more symbolic, after the senate votes to re-appoint one of the main architects of the disaster, Ben Bernanke, than the fraying of his patch and glue rescue work? The problem facing the elite in 2008 was much like the problem that faced the foreign policy elite in 2002: a numbers problem. In 2002, it became evident that the U.S. was never going to be willing to field enough soldiers in Iraq to truly occupy the country. Thus, no matter if you agreed with the invasion or thought it was simply dirty and immoral – I chose the latter position – the chances that it would be a success were stunningly low. This truth was uttered by one of the unlikely messangers of Nemesis, General Shinseki, who was no genius, but simply the accountant of death and destruction – a military specialty – toting up sums. However, when it turned out that the second coming of Hitler rolled over like a rotten mush mellon, the venues of conventional wisdom were triumphant – the naysayers of our great liberation were proven o so wrong! Well, a fiasco eight years later, of course, the naysayers can count up the dead, the wounded, the money and the exiles and well ask: was this much effort worth putting in place the coven of warlords that presently rule Iraq? The answer of course is no. And the answer comes with a codicil: the opportunity space – let’s call it – for pursuing the fall of Saddam Hussein was never opened up in the run up to the war. Nobody talked of recognizing Iran, or supplying Northern Iraq, that happy little autonomous place with the smuggler lords on top of it, with money to make the place bloom a little.

The opportunity space that opened up in October, 2008 with the fall of Lehman was similarly about the systematic cause of the failure of Reagonism. You’d have to be an economist not to see it: the rising level of exploitation, as the Marxist would say, or the stagnating median income and rising long term unemployment killed the flip this golden goose economy.

And the numbers were, similarly, all about inequality and its cost, in the end. When the wealthy can get wealthy by piling up trillions of dollars of securitized instruments and playing the ontological spread between the nominal and the real, they will do it. Unsurprisingly, there goes the capital that is supposedly being ‘efficiently’ allotted to those enterprises that actually, like, produce a good or service. The Patchwork kids then went on their tangent. And they produced a great illusion – which, they were happy to see, bore fruit in the stock runup of 2009.

That illusion may be coming apart. Just as the first few weeks after the Iraq invasion it was all, Mission Accomplished, so, too, it has been with the refusal to address the deep systematic problems with the way the economy has been restructured in the Reagan era. Viz that inequality. So, recently, the NYT posted a thumbsucker about the astonishing fact that 10 percent of American homeowners own houses that are significantly underwater, and when today the news slips out that the Mediterranean countries are either going to have to be bailed out by the EU or we are all gonna die, we can get a better look at those Fed-TARP patches. Apparently need patches. Someday, we will look back on the 17th century search for the philosopher’s stone as a model of lucidity compared to the refusal of the elite to understand the situation we are in.

So, here’s a kicky coupla grafs from the jinglemail article:

New research suggests that when a home’s value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying.
In a situation without precedent in the modern era, millions of Americans are in this bleak position. Whether, or how, to help them is one of the biggest questions the Obama administration confronts as it seeks a housing policy that would contribute to the economic recovery.
“We haven’t yet found a way of dealing with this that would, we think, be practical on a large scale,” the assistantTreasury secretary for financial stability, Herbert M. Allison Jr., said in a recent briefing.
The number of Americans who owed more than their homes were worth was virtually nil when the real estate collapse began in mid-2006, but by the third quarter of 2009, an estimated 4.5 million homeowners had reached the critical threshold, with their home’s value dropping below 75 percent of the mortgage balance.
They are stretched, aggrieved and restless. With figures released last week showing that the real estate market was stalling again, their numbers are now projected to climb to a peak of 5.1 million by June — about 10 percent of all Americans with mortgages

What Earthquakes Shatter

The story in the NYT starts: “The fact that Haiti was mired in dysfunction well before the earthquake, despite having received more than $5 billion in aid over about two decades…”

It is hard to get past a start that presents an act of astonishing callousness as an act of astonishing generosity. The poorest nation in the hemisphere, which was invaded by the U.S. three times over the past hundred years, received almost a gigantic 250 million per year – this is supposed to make us shake in our boots at the magnanimity of it all. The Timesmen obviously expect the Haitians to say of our astonishing generosity what the Psalmist says of the Lord, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness” – but those greedy Haitians were not satisfied and still remained poor! How can such things be.

For comparison sake, look at that gigantic amount going down the maw of Haiti with, say, cost overruns for the last decade at the Pentagon. These came in at a minimal – really, these guys are taking a haircut – a pequena, tiny tiny cost of – it is really amazing – cost of – how the Pentagon just has to squeeze these things in, run a tight ship – cost of 300 billion dollars in cost overruns. Which would mean that the ratio of cost overrun for obsolete weapons systems over the past ten years is at a ratio of about 100:1 over the foreign aid to Haiti. Or, to put it in simpler terms, every package of screws, bolts and ringers bought by the Pentagon is at the cost of one Haitian life. Oh, the price is so right! Or perhaps we could look at the cost of foreign aid to Israel since 1997, which comes to 103 billion dollars.

Now, that would be a showstopping article: “The fact that Israel was mired in dysfunction well before the siege of the Gaza Strip, despite having received more than $103 billion in aid over about 12 years…”

However, don’t hold your breath for that article to come out.

I’ve been thinking, lately, about demonic voices. I wrote about this in a post last September:

“We all know how to recognize demons. The demonic voice has one overriding characteristic: he will always use the logic of the system against its structure. Thus, when a voice demands that women play their traditional role in the home, while manipulating the economy so that the median household, just in order to stay still, must throw into the pot 350 more working hours per year – which is the difference between the median household of 1970 and the median household of today – you know you have caught a demon.”

Marx, that witch, had a thing to say about the demonic voice in the economic-philosophical manuscripts. He related what I cal the demonic element in our discourse to what he called alienation.

Don’t I obey the laws of economics when I gain money from the surrender, the sale of my body to a stranger’s lust (the factory workers in France name the prostitution of their wives and daughters the 10th hour of work, which is literally true), or am I not acting in the properly national economic way by selling my neighbor to the Morrocans (and the unmediated commerce in human beings as the trade in conscripts, etc. is found in all the ‘cultured’ lands), the economist will answer me: you aren’t transgressing my laws; but see what Mother Morality and Mother Religion say; my economic morality and religion has nothing to reproach you for, but, - but whom should I now believe, economics or morality? The morality of economics is gain, labor and savings, sobriety – but economics promises to satisfy my needs. The morality of the economy is wealth with a good conscience, virtue, etc., but how can I be virtuous when I cannot be, how can I have a good conscience when I know nothing? This is grounded in the the essence of alienation, that every sphere lays other and opposed yardsticks upon me, one for morality, one for the economy, because each is a particular alienation of humankind and each fixes a particular circle of alienated essential activity, each creates alienated relations to other alienations.”

We are ground, then, as human being between these circles. If you want to see how human beings can be ground finely like wheat into flour, read the newspaper, or listen to the tv news. That’s how it is done. An earthquake, a truly apocalyptic earthquake like that which has destroyed Port au Prince, destroys, as well, for the moment, the schizophrenia that allows us to get by, that has shaped us to get by with those circles in our head and in our circumstances.

its delicious - made from offal and rat turds! all for you.

I have no liking for Bruce Bartlett, Reaganite and former WSJ editorial writer, but he wrinkled out the meaning of the Oregon vote:

Yesterday, the citizens of Oregon ratified a large tax increase on corporations and the wealthy. The top personal income tax rate will rise by two percentage points and the minimum tax on corporations will also rise, including a new tax even on those with no profits to report, according to a Wall Street Journalreport. According to Tax Foundation data, this would make the top rate in Oregon 13 percent

This vote is considered a bellwether because the state has previously beensupportive of tax limitation measures. Also, it appears that populist anger, which has previously been channeled toward the anti-tax tea party movement, may have the potential to swing in the other direction when people are faced with cuts in programs with wide support.

I can easily see many tea party goers becoming rabid tax-the-rich folks if the alternative is higher taxes on them. Let us not forget that just about a year ago many of the House of Representatives' most conservative members voted to impose a 90 percent tax rate on bank bonuses. As I noted at the time, those supporting this confiscatory tax measure included Eric Canter, Peter Hoekstra and Paul Ryan.
I have foreseen this development for some years and feared that once our budgetary problems forced action that sharply higher tax rates on the rich, corporations and capital in general would be the inevitable consequence. “

Unfortunately, there has been a dominant liberal discourse about why “Kansas is Republican” – why the people who theoretically benefit most from government outlays vote for the GOP – which posits that this is the primitive instinct of people who are stupidly afraid of losing their guns. Actually, this notion of the general barbarity of the populace has broad and deep roots in progressive history, which is why, at the turn of the century one hundred ten years ago, most progressive reform was about taking power away from the corrupt and giving it to the managers. In other words, you can’t trust the people.

There might well be reasons not to trust the people, but this is not because they are barbarous and don’t know how to make a simple calculation. The calculation is that you get more of an advantage in every way if you vote for tax cutters who will never really have the power or desire to cut government programs that benefit you. On the one side, you protect your guns, get lower taxes, and get your agricultural supports and your Big Pharma pills – and on the other side, you get ruled by people who think your culture and guns are shit and may not raise your taxes, but you never know – plus you get about the same level of government support. Score GOP!

When you consider the people in the sticks to be too stupid to define their own self interest – which the what’s a matter with Kansas crowd always defines in terms of money, as if the East Coast liberal would give up his culture in a heartbeat if you offered him a hundred more bucks – they understandably vote against you.

But the money is running out. It is still running out. We have been told that Ben Bernanke ‘saved us’ from the Great Depression. What that means is: by performing a prodigious slight of hand, the Fed has, for the moment, produced the illusion that the banks are solvent. It is a delusion that has resulted in big payouts to bank officials and announcement of a bumper year. But, as the guy at Rortybomb argues, because the banks aren’t writing down their massive losses doesn’t mean the masses losses disappear – rather, the game now seems to be simple predation, with the support of the government. The mortgage modification program, if it works, is a disaster, and if it doesn’t, is a disaster. The money, I have long thought, should be yanked, all of it, and a small business loan agency created from it to inject money into the system in real time in a sector that employs people right away. Those small businesses that currently owe at 10 percent could pay off with money they borrow at 2 percent – which would be a big gain – and thus regain a certain limberness, which they simply can’t afford to have at present. Since one of the most hard hit sectors among the unemployed are the 18-28 year olds, and since small businesses disproportionately employ them, this would be a win for the party that does this.

It would be a loss for the banks, however, and they would put the keebosh on it. I only float this balloon as a sort of test of the terrain, a demonstration of the no future that is our present policy.

Felix Salmon has a nice overview of Rortybomb’s point, and makes one of his own:

“Konczal also looks long and hard at the banks’ refusal to write down the principal on their loans, despite the fact that if you modify a loan so that it remains seriously underwater, you’re pretty much guaranteeing an extremely high redefault rate. After all, negative equity is pretty much the best single predictor of delinquency.

Why are the banks behaving like this? I think the obvious answer is the right one: they’re holding these loans on their books at much more than they’re really worth, and they can’t afford to take the write-downs which would accompany principal reductions of roughly the same magnitude as the decline in housing prices. This kind of head-in-the-sand behavior can only possibly work if housing prices suddenly rebound in the next couple of years, and that ain’t gonna happen.

Both the Bush and the Obama administrations tried to put together programs to deal with the banks’ toxic residential real-estate assets: the original TARP was one, the PPIP was another. Neither went anywhere, and as a result the problem is just as bad now as it’s always been. Remember that, when you look at the enormous 2009 bank bonuses, and ask yourself whether any of them will be clawed back if it turns out that last year’s profits were dwarfed by the write-downs that banks should have taken and didn’t.”

It is a puzzle how a potential 4 trillion dollar shortfall in December 2008 became all righty when fed about half of that amount by March, 2009. If these admittedly drive by analyses are right, then the smoke and mirrors act just gave us an intermission.

All of which means that the political establishment is working in such a disconnect from the political reality in the hinterlands that there are going to be changes of one kind or another. Both parties, I think, are going to tacitly converge on a solution: America’s medium income is going to have to slide down. This was the grand pact of the Reagan era, but at that time, the idea was that credit could take up the slack and the country would grow enough to carry that credit burden. I think the new grand pact will be that the country can’t really afford such a, well, extravagant middle class. What, after all, do those householders do? Whereas important people, people at the top, work hard – they play hard, but they get their rewards because they are the smartest and the best. But they are getting tired of trickling down to such losers.

If this is the new Dem-GOP pact, we’ll go into the second phase of the Reagan era. The problem will be getting the doggies to eat the dogfood, as always. I think that the political elite on both sides is sorta convinced of the stupid red state thesis – it would make sense to them, and, in their onesided understanding of the world, it would never occur to them that freeriding can be a calculated decision. Thus, there may be a lot of fluidity between the teabaggers and a left of the Oregon type. Bartlett, to his horror, might turn out to be right.